Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week represents a new milestone in DnD’s ongoing invasion of my every waking moment, as we ran through our first twelve-hour session, running from three in the afternoon to way too fucking late in the goddamn morning. Assured by our guest DM (party leader of our first two campaigns, now playing second to my character in campaign three) that this would just be “a quick investigation followed by a Metal Gear Solid boat,” we found ourselves ten hours later in the midst of a fight with an unkillable barbarian, recreating the Vamp water battle in an actively sinking ship. I have lost control of my life.
That aside, this week also featured some excellent film screenings, alongside my conclusion of the beloved original Trigun. Let’s talk about all that!
First up this week was Yellow Submarine, the Beatles’ animated adventure from the streets of London to the fantastical hills of Pepperland. Directed by animator/producer George Dunning, the film offers a rambling series of surreal escapades aboard the titular submarine, all accompanied by the Beatles’ mixture of dry wit and delightful Sgt. Peppers-era songs.
The Beatles themselves don’t actually feature in this one, save for a brief appearance by the end designed to fulfill their United Artists’ contract obligations. But their vocal doubles do a fine job of evoking their humor and rapport, conveying much the same sarcasm and easy mutual comfort of the boys themselves in A Hard Day’s Night. Their good humor is here accompanied by an imaginative array of phantasmagoric imagery, ranging from the Seussian landscapes of the sea bottom to altered photography and rotoscoped flappers set to dazzling lights.
The whole thing is very loose in a narrative sense, but drama isn’t the point; the film is more like a Beatles-centric Fantasia, offering a series of loosely connected music videos set to a diverse array of Beatles tunes. The imagery is delightful, and offers a portrait of mid-century animation quite unlike either contemporaneous anime or western cartoons, aligned more with pop art than Popeye. The music is also obviously excellent, although the song selection seems a bit odd – the film originals are clearly a step down from the Beatles’ mainline material, combining nursery rhyme McCartney toss-offs (All Together Now) with undercooked Harrison experiments (Only a Northern Song). Nonetheless, if you have any fondness for the Beatles or experimental animation, the film is a must-see, as endearing as it is inventive.
We then checked out Eyes of Fire, an ‘83 folk horror drama set in a small village on the American frontier. When a mysterious young preacher named Will Smythe is accused of adultery, he embarks on an exodus with his handful of true believers, eventually setting up camp in a valley he declares the “promised land.” However, dark spirits haunt his chosen paradise, and the party soon finds themselves tormented by a bizarre array of malevolent forces.
Eyes of Fire is basically a low-budget, dubiously cast version of Robert Eggers’ The Witch, following a preacher with no power beyond his own ego as he drags his flock into the crossfire between two flavors of genuine old world magic. And if you know me, you know I love my ambiguous, evocative takes on the supernatural; though Eyes of Fire’s effects aren’t exactly “convincing,” they are diverse and strange, a loose assemblage of powers and imagery that imply a world suffused with forces beyond our control or understanding.
What is truly haunting these pilgrims is never made entirely clear; their world-weary trapper offers one hypothesis, but assures his companions that his tale is but one among many, an attempt by humans to ascribe intention to the ambiguous will of the natural world. Piety fails, paganism reigns, and order crumbles, even as the preacher’s apostles break from his spell and seek their own destinies. Tramping out into the woods, Eyes of Fire’s team spun a budget likely not much greater than that of Evil Dead into an ambiguous fable evoking Algernon Blackwood’s tales; I found myself more than impressed with this humble yet highly ambitious production.
Next up was The Mechanic, a Jason Statham actioner starring our boy as hitman Arthur Bishop, whose certainty in his life path is shaken when he is commanded to assassinate his own former mentor (Donald Sutherland). To make amends, he takes Sutherland’s troubled son Steve (Ben Foster) under his wing, teaching him the finer points of professional assassination. But soon, both Bishop’s crimes and those of his parent organization breach the surface, precipitating a bloody secret war of succession.
The Mechanic is a pretty no-frills Statham scenario, with its thin plot somewhat elevated by the superior abilities of its principles. Sutherland and Foster are far more accomplished costars than you expect from Statham vehicles, and both put in excellent work here, doing their best to add pathos to a script entirely lacking in nuance or subtlety. The wheels eventually start to come off regarding the film’s incredibly underwritten scaffolding, prompting even the most game audiences to likely ask “wait, why is anyone doing anything? Who does anybody actually work for?” But by that time, the action has likely escalated sufficiently to drown out such sensible questions, while Foster’s committed performance just barely manages to steer the drama home. The Mechanic is ultimately worse than the sum of its parts, but still better than you’d expect from a Statham rent-payer, and far from the worst use of a Sunday afternoon.
Alongside all the film screenings, I’ve also spent the last few weeks munching through the original Trigun, and greatly enjoying Vash the Stampede’s rambling adventures. The show fits within the general “space cowboy” aesthetic of productions like Cowboy Bebop or Outlaw Star, though in this case, the emphasis is far more on the “cowboy” part of that equation. Vash never leaves his dustbowl of a planet, and episodes proceed like lonesome wild west fables, as our pacifist gunman’s values are challenged time and again by the brutality of life on the frontier.
I missed out on Trigun during its original cultural heyday, likely due to my piecemeal introduction to it via random episodes aired on Adult Swim. Those episodes gave me a mistaken impression of the show as deeply invested in obnoxious “loud noises are funny, right” comedy routines, but Vash’s antics are actually pretty judiciously scattered across a series that’s otherwise genuinely invested in its characters, establishing a strong rapport between its four leads as they contend with an array of melancholy hardships. Conflicts generally resolve in Vash having to reveal a flourish of his superhuman abilities, but the fact that Vash is genuinely committed to pacifism creates an excellent mechanical tension, forcing him to engineer a wide array of innovative solutions in order to avoid simply killing those who oppose him.
The show’s aesthetic is also top notch, the grit and grime of Vash’s world conveyed through lush cel photography of variably desolate frontier towns. Atmosphere is key here; Nightow’s philosophical insights are admittedly a touch facile, but these characters really know how to sell their ponderous reflections on mortality, affecting a tantalizing mixture of self-consciously cool distance and earnest empathy. Things get a touch more formulaic as Vash is forced to deal with a gang of superhuman assassins, but the style and cast remain strong all through the end. I quite enjoyed my journey with Trigun, and can easily see how someone who met it at the right age would be utterly entranced by its world.
